So I’ve become obsessed with the website This is Why You’re Fat. Every day, the creators of the site (who are they? My heart cries out for an ‘about us’ page!) post pornographically glistening pictures of unbelievable foods—foods that will make you gasp aloud in a mixture of horror and admiration. It is a website dedicated to the daring spirit of such monuments to grotesque over-consumption as the 36-layer “double-stuff” oreo, the gravy pizza, the bacon-wrapped meatloaf stuffed with mac & cheese (recipe here—one has to wonder, given that you’re just going to sandwich the mac & cheese between two layers of sizzling ground chuck, why bother with the saffron and truffles?). I contend that the website hasn’t taken it far enough. So far, they’ve only shown us foods that contain a staggering amount of fat or sugar.

lardo

I give you Lardo. It is exactly what it sounds like. It is pig-fat—and that’s all. Harvested from the back of a pig (which must, by government decree, weigh at least 380 pounds), it’s then laid in marble troughs with layers of salt and herbs and cured in a cool cellar for at least six months. The result is a pale, cool, veined, delicate salumi that you slice thinly and eat in a sandwich with tomato (yum), or put on pizza or crostini so that it melts (gross). Think of it as bacon without all that pink stuff.

Though it sounds like the kind of thing Louis XIV might have had naked women drop into his mouth, Lardo was originally a poor man’s food. It was considered ideal fuel for marble-quarry workers in the town of Colonnata. In 1996, the Italian government raided Colonnata and seized hundreds of marble casks, claiming (despite literally 1000 years of local experience to the contrary) that uncooked pig fat couldn’t possibly be sterile.

Lardo has since come under the dubious protection of the Slow Food movement (“we’re coming to help you. Right away. Just as soon as we fix lunch. Three, maybe four hours”), which has declared it an “endangered food.” Now, the salumi is celebrated in a Lardo festival at the end of August, a heady four-day fat-binge that draws tourists from all over Europe. And you’ll have to go straight there to get it—the US won’t import raw pork from Italy, ever since one asshole once threw a half-eaten pork sandwich into a pigsty (seriously, dude? That didn’t strike as just a tiny bit wrong?) and a bunch of people got African swine fever. Whatever, whiners. Speaking of tourists, if you’re ever in Italy and you’re offered something called “white prosciutto,” it’s Lardo—a euphemism for pure, unrepentant fat, designed to spare Americans’ delicate sensibilities.

It’s kind of funny that the world’s fattest citizens think that all fat is poison. Or maybe this is too broad a generalization—maybe it’s only fat-obsessed skinny rich people (the kind who can get to Italy) who’d be likely to turn up their surgically-enhanced noses if they knew what white prosciutto really was. I guess what’s really funny is that having tons of money breeds, not culture and breadth of taste, but philistinism and finickiness. I take comfort in one thing: at the coffee shop where I work, the half-n-half always runs out the quickest.